In Tesuque, No One's Actually in Charge, and This Year Proved It Twice

Drive up Bishop's Lodge Road this past year and you'd pass two things that have nothing to do with each other on paper. Protest signs, planted by neighbors along the resort's fence line every Saturday. And, a few miles further up the valley, a new glass-walled lecture hall on the Santa Fe Institute's Miller Campus, hosting scientists from Oklahoma and the Smithsonian for symposiums on complexity theory. One is a fight over where a luxury hotel's treated sewage goes. The other is a research nonprofit adding meeting space. They landed in Tesuque in the same stretch of months for a reason that has nothing to do with either institution's plans and everything to do with what kind of place Tesuque legally is.

Tesuque is a census-designated place, not an incorporated town. There's no mayor, no village council, no local zoning office with a Tesuque letterhead. The valley is governed by Santa Fe County, and that distinction decided the outcome of both stories this year before either one really started.

A Rural Overlay With a Narrow Reach

In 2024, Santa Fe County adopted the Tesuque Community District Overlay, a zoning tool built from the county's updated Tesuque Community Plan. The overlay is meant to keep the valley's open pasture and piñon hillsides from filling in with the kind of density that's changed other parts of the county. New construction in the district faces limits on impervious surface, xeriscaping requirements, and rules meant to keep agricultural land from getting fragmented by subdivision.

It's the one governance lever Tesuque residents actually have a hand in, through county public hearings and community plan input. It's also narrower than most people assume. The overlay regulates land use and new construction within the county's zoning authority. It doesn't reach a state environmental permit issued by a cabinet secretary in Santa Fe, and it doesn't reach a building already sited on land a private nonprofit owns outright. Both of this year's biggest Tesuque stories fell outside what the overlay was built to touch, for two very different reasons.

The Permit That Got Decided at a Desk in Santa Fe

Bishop's Lodge has operated a wastewater treatment plant since the mid-1970s. It stopped working reliably years ago, forcing the resort to truck sewage to the city's treatment plant, a method that is expensive and, everyone involved agrees, not sustainable long term. In 2024 the resort installed a new Membrane BioReactor treatment system and applied to the New Mexico Environment Department for a permit to discharge up to 30,000 gallons a day into a new leach field, roughly double the resort's previous limit.

The leach field sits about 75 to 100 feet from Little Tesuque Creek. That proximity, and the fact that most homes in the valley rely on private wells, is what turned a routine permit renewal into a fight that ran for more than a year. A group called Protect Tesuque formed in opposition, filed objections through NMED's administrative process, and organized weekly Saturday protests outside the resort. In April 2025 the group asked the New Mexico Supreme Court to intervene on an emergency basis, arguing the state had applied the wrong water quality law to the permit. The court asked both sides to file written arguments, heard oral arguments that July, and ruled against Protect Tesuque, clearing the way for the administrative process to finish.

That process ended in September 2025. Hearing Officer Felicia Orth issued a 66-page recommendation finding no legal basis to deny the permit. Environment Secretary James Kenney signed final approval within weeks, almost exactly a year before this piece was written. Protect Tesuque board member Rusty Day called the decision a case where state protections "walks past" the standards ordinary homeowners are held to. Bernadette Jaramillo-Romero, a board member who described herself as a lifetime Tesuque resident, put the group's position more simply: every homeowner is told to protect the water they share, and the same standard should apply to a resort.

The permit is now final. Nobody in Tesuque had a formal vote on it, because the decision never belonged to the county or the village. It belonged to NMED, and specifically to Kenney's desk, the whole time.

A separate legal fight is still open. In July 2025, Bishop's Lodge sued Protect Tesuque and individual board members, asking a judge to bar the group's protests within a mile of the resort and arguing the demonstrations had crossed into harassment. Protect Tesuque called the suit an attempt to intimidate a volunteer community group, and the ACLU of New Mexico issued a public statement backing that view. A hearing in that case was set for November 2025. No public update on its outcome has surfaced since.

The Building That Needed No Village Sign-Off

While the permit fight played out on Bishop's Lodge Road, the Santa Fe Institute was finishing a very different kind of expansion three miles away. SFI's Miller Campus in Tesuque was built on land gifted by art collector Eugene Thaw in 2012. In April 2025, the institute opened the Gurley Forum, a 6,000-square-foot lecture hall funded by trustee Bill Gurley, with floor-to-ceiling glass and a covered portal facing the Sangre de Cristo range.

The building hosted its first event that same month, the 2025 Complexity Science Symposium, followed that spring and summer by an engineering forum led by SFI president David Krakauer and a "Science of History" meeting organized with researchers from the University of Oklahoma and the Smithsonian Institution. None of it required a hearing before the county commission, because SFI already owned the land and the project didn't trigger the overlay's density or subdivision provisions. A private nonprofit's board decided to build a meeting hall on its own campus, and it did.

Two institutional neighbors, two expansions, and in neither case did the valley's zoning tool have a formal seat at the table. That's not a flaw in how the overlay was written. It's a description of what a rural land use ordinance is actually built to regulate, and what it was never going to reach.

What This Looks Like From the Village

None of this changed where people in Tesuque actually gather to compare notes. That still happens at Tesuque Village Market, the general store and restaurant that's anchored the center of the village since 1989, or down the road at El Nido, the 1920s roadhouse known for its wood-fired menu. Tesuque Creek Trail still loops about three and a half miles through juniper and ponderosa pine. Camel Rock still marks the turn toward the pueblo. Tesuque Glassworks still runs live glassblowing demonstrations most days of the week.

What's different is that the two biggest institutional stories of the past year and a half both got decided somewhere other than the village, by people who don't live there, using processes the valley has no formal vote in beyond public comment. The overlay zoning that took years to write protects setbacks and open space. It was never built to referee a state discharge permit or a nonprofit's building committee, and this year both of those showed up at once to prove it.

If you're trying to keep track of what's actually happening in the neighborhoods around Santa Fe, from zoning fights to what opens and closes on Main Street, the Bunny Terry Group covers it neighborhood by neighborhood. Start your Santa Fe story with people who follow these places as closely as the people who live in them.